Have to say your response is typical. My disdain for your current President means I'm a bigot? Figures. Must be because hes black, right?

Quote:

Originally Posted by triple88a

If they did there would be terrorism involved in the story somewhere... It might be something along the lines of "This bunch of foxes worked with this terrorist group and Kony, blah blah blah... they are bad foxes".

Obama has never gone on the record and said he supports gay anything until yesterday. he may have implied it but never stated it outright.

Maybe it's an even more cynical calculation. According to Gay Patriot:

Quote:

Wonder if this sudden change of heart had something to do with money. A few weeks ago, Ed Morrissey noted that “Obama remains significantly off of his own 2008 pace of fundraising, and way under the Democratic donation performance of that cycle.” And as Dan Eggen reports in the Washington Post:

Many of Obama’s key financial supporters are gay–including finance director Rufus Gifford and Democratic National Committee treasurer Andrew Tobias–and the campaign has regularly held fundraisers focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender donors.

A review of Obama’s top bundlers, who have brought in $500,000 or more for the campaign, shows that about one in six publicly identify themselves as gay.

I know what you're saying, but what kind of "new evidence" would have possibly changed Obama's opinion on same sex marriages?

-2 for that? It's a serious question. y8s' point makes sense if we were discussing, say, a politician changing his views on global warming. But I have a hard time figuring out what exactly has changed such that Obama felt it necessary to change his policy views.

And across the board, people feel uncomfortable when politicians change their policy views for no apparent reason, because it feels like a betrayal to the voters who supported him or her.

I would replace "trash" with "investment banking" which can be useful and productive and I don't reject speculative trading... Just not when it is implicitly backed with government guarantees via the FDIC. "Private profit, public loss" is not a good business model for society.

How much of the "free market" becomes an illusion when there are only a handful of competitors?

None, provided that those competitors which remain are not in collusion.

(I'm not certain that "free market" is the correct term for the phenomenon which I believe that image is attempting to convey.)

If anything, the presence of a small number of large, national corporations better satisfies the concepts of "competition" and "free market", as viewed from the perspective of an individual consumer, than a large number small, independent businesses.

Take the precooked, prepackaged meats industry, as an example.

In scenario A, each town with a population larger than 10,000 but smaller than 250,000 individuals is served by one local supplier of precooked, prepackaged meats, which is based in that town and services no other. Nationwide, there are hundreds of different small and medium-sized packaged meat suppliers.

In scenario B, the country is dominated by just two megafarms, which service all markets regardless of size.

Which scenario better illustrates the concept of a free market? Why, scenario B, of course.

In the first scenario, no town smaller than 250,000 people is served by more than one supplier, so a de-facto monopoly exists in those areas. There is no competition for customers of prepackaged meats. In this environment, it is almost certain that price gouging will occur in some areas, leading the people to call for government regulation of meat pricing, which is precisely the opposite of a free market.

In the second scenario, every person in the country, regardless of the size of the city in which they live, has a choice between two suppliers of prepackaged meats. As such, there is a natural regulation of the retail price of packaged meats.